A Streetcar Named Desire

A Streetcar Named Desire: Reading plays, watching plays

Revisiting literature offers us a chance to impart new perspectives and insights - that’s not a revolutionary idea but it’s an important one. Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire is a play close to my heart, and one for which I think I will always reserve the label “Genius.” In part I wonder if it’s because I spent so long poring over it, picking at the bones for every detail in word choice or staging or soundscape. Streetcar is one of those stories which haunts you. Not necessarily because you can really empathise with the characters but because their troubles are so complex, difficult, and entwined that you feel you can’t let go of them. Part of the problem is Williams. If he wasn’t so good at writing maybe we wouldn’t care so much; alas, he’s rather brilliant.

Previously I’ve made the case for stories which have made for excellent adaptations, where adaptation has breathed new life into a text rather than dulling its quality. In this case I want to say that the material is the real deal. More than that, I’d say that whilst Streetcar is a play and is made to be watched on stage, there’s a richness to it which is worth reading as words on the page. There are moments when Streetcar reads like a novel, where stage directions are like a narrator creating the atmosphere and where dialogue is not simply speech but poetry. There’s something about reading this play which has an escapist quality unlike that which theatre can bring us.

That said, it would be a disservice to say that Streetcar should only be read as opposed to watched. It’s a story that should be seen not merely because that’s what you do with plays but because there is so much depth and complexity at work. The characters are pitiful, infuriating, terrifying, sensitive, ignorant, empathetic, rude and sometimes all of these things at once. Each character holds in them a whole world of thinking and feeling, and often their relationships result in cosmic catastrophe. What I’m saying is that these characters are not just stock images, but fully formed and complicated people and in their faults they are magnetic. You’re not drawn into their lives and the story because you’re having a good time but because you’re trying to work out where each of these characters are coming from and why they make the decisions they do.

Streetcar isn’t set in a fantasy world; it’s rooted in history and lived experience–in fact Williams’ own history and life–but it definitely offers us the chance to wonder about fictional lives and how they reflect reality. How does someone like Blanche DuBois relate at all to real people? And I mean that not just as a question about her sanity and her ability to be empathetic, but as a question of how her life and experiences might speak to people in comparable circumstances. People who have suffered loss, who have had their sense of stability ripped from underneath them, and seek kindness from strangers. What about someone like Stanley Kowalski? Born into a culture which both reveres and reviles him, a New Man in a world in flux, trying to assert dominance in any way he can. The consequences are tragic and devastating, in more ways than one.

A Streetcar Named Desire is one of those stories I’d put on my list of 100 Things to Read Before You Die, and I mean that seriously. It’s a genius construction of tragedy, building tension and intensity before it all comes crashing down horrifically. It’s the kind of story that deserves watching and rewatching, reading and rereading. A work so carefully crafted, requires equal effort from us as readers and audiences to mull it over, to give it time and be truly invested. Only then can we hope to understand.